A Seller's Critique

Will this be the death blow for the once formidable app? (Credit: Imgur) In my initial review of Mercari, I noted that the shipping rates are a big part of what makes the marketplace work, assuming you know how best to take advantage of them. I suppose that original theory still works, but it's going to take a little more strategic planning than it did in the past, as Mercari has unleashed another round of shipping markups, which went into effect on February 25th. Not a big deal, or just a part of doing business, you may be thinking? After all, shipping rates across all carriers just went up last month, so the timing of this certainly makes sense. However, it was less than a year ago (April, 2018) that the rates last went up, so for them to go up again--by as much as 52% in some categories--makes Mercari seem less and less like a viable long-term solution for many sellers. Let's analyze these over the previous year's increases, shall we? April, 2018 price i...

I first started selling on Mercari back in April, 2018. Actually, let me rephrase that...I first started TRYING to sell on Mercari back in April. After putting up five or six test items, all priced well below current prices (they had been sitting in my inventory a while and I just wanted to get rid of them), and getting nothing but “likes” (which grew to feel like taunts), I grew disheartened. The final nail in the coffin was when Mercari automatically deactivated all of my items due to "inactivity". Angered, I vowed never to return. Let the above anecdote—which did happen—serve as a lesson to all of you. We live in a society where it's all about immediate gratification; where we succumb to the sameness of routines even as we try swearing them off. So many times I've seen people leave eBay, throw up their inventory on other sites, and then get angered when said site doesn't provide the exact same results with the exact same amount of effort (which in many ca...